Animation 40
Interview: Koji Yamamoto
By Gianni Simone. It’s tough being an animator. While Japanese animation is currently having a lot of success both at home and abroad, many anime studios don’t seem to be enjoying the benefits. It is hard to churn out one hit after another while working on a tiny budget, and although most studios manage to […]
The Shower
By Andrew Osmond. The Shower is a 48-minute Korean animated film screening this coming Saturday (3rd November) as part of the London Korean Film Festival. The venue is the Phoenix Cinema at noon, and tickets are available here. It depicts an encounter between two young children, a boy and girl teetering on adolescence in a […]
Once Upon a Time… Life
By Raz Greenberg. Based on Akane Shimizu’s original manga, David Production’s Cells at Work! quickly became one of the highlights of the current anime season, especially due to its innovative concept: portraying the cells within the human body as anthropomorphised characters, with a particular emphasis given to the daring deliveries of oxygen by the red […]
Disenchantment
By Andrew Osmond. The first thing to stress is that Disenchantment, now streaming on Netflix, gets better. This is a terrible advert for a TV series, of course, though anime fans may be readier than most viewers to give animated shows time to improve. After a first part that feels naff and derivative – and […]
Flavors of Youth
By Andrew Osmond. In 2016, Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name became the highest-grossing Japanese film ever released in China. That may explain the existence of the Japan-animated, Chinese-set Flavors of Youth (as the film is called on pretty much every Anglophone source online, so Brit readers will just have to put up with the American spelling). […]